[xwiki-devs] [Brainstorming] Improving easiness of creating wiki links

Hi devs, A user has reported the following, mentioning it was taking a lot of steps, and we’ve all experimented that creating wiki links could be easier: “ 1. Go to page you want to link to (Target Page). a. Copy URL 2. Go to page where you want to add the link (Source Page) 3. Edit it using Wiki Syntax Editor 4. Create the link    i.    Write [[    ii.   write label    iii.  write >>    iv.   paste the link pointing to Target Page    v.    Remove https://w.amazon.com/bin/view  from pasted link    vi.   Replace manually all encoded URL strings (like + and other symbols)    vii.  Replace “/” with “.”    viii. Add WebHome    ix.   write ]] 5. Save 6. Done. " So I’d like to brainstorm about what we could do to make it easier to creating wiki links. Some ideas: A) Remove step 4. ix with http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-12920 B) The label>> parts (steps ii and iii) can be omitted, especially when the link label generation is configured to use titles C) The real solution for me is autocomplete on links: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-206 This should probably be implemented in the autocomplete extension: see http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/AutoCompletion+API and http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/AutoCompletion+Applica… D) Using CTRL+G helps since it provides the reference and helps in finding the page to link to. It can be considered as a simplified autocomplete, ie a simplified impl for C). E) Marius mentioned elsewhere: "I would also like to have a common Insert Link dialog between the CKEditor and the Wiki Editor. You click on a button on the tool bar, you get a dialog where you can search for the target page (or select it from the tree) and then click Insert, which will generate the wiki syntax for your. The Insert Link dialog can have a shortcut key for quick access. Of course autocomplete is nicer but it's more work, while the Insert Link dialog is a must for the CKEditor anyway.” F) Marius mentioned elsewhere: "We can also implement a dedicated "Insert Reference" dialog for the Wiki Editor that offers a text input where you can paste an URL and the dialog attempts to extract the entity reference from the URL and inserts it in the Wiki Editor text area to be used for links but also for macros or anywhere where you might need a document reference. This can be implemented as an XWiki extension.” G) Add the ability to paste a full URL in the reference part of wiki links and upon save the Rendering will automatically transform it into a document reference if it’s a local link. And if you want a real url for a local link then you’d need to use the “url:” prefix. Implementation: One relatively simple solution is to parse the URL (using a ResourceTypeResolver/ResourceReferenceResolver) and then serialize it and verify if the result matches the passed URL. If it does it means it’s a local URL.  H) Caty mentioned elsewhere: "We could display the reference of a page in: a. a Permalink dialog (containing the URL + reference) that the user can copy paste in browser input or editor b. Information tab c. other?” IMO the best (possibly not the easiest) are C) and G). With those 2 we would get: * easy pasting of existing URLs * easily finding the page you want to link to when you don’t have its URL Now, even if we agree to do C) and G) in the future I still think that all the other ideas (ie. E, F and H) could also be implemented. WDYT? Thanks -Vincent